A New Year's Note for 2019

On these "pages" (!) I have railed against New Years wrap-ups - particularly when they are pleas for pity due to misfortune on the one hand, or medals and awards for hard won accomplishments (self improvement) on the other. That was before this phrase "virtue signaling" entered the lexicon (one of manifold vogue words or phrases to enter the 2000s). Now my problem with such public pronouncements is not that they are insincere or egotistic. On the contrary, I have no doubt that people are genuine in their motives and that they have virtues for which they should be proud, and I am inwardly most happy at the thought that there are individuals who have overcome the worst forms of privation or injustice and, when requested and appropriate,  I might express my verdict publicly as well.  Not only do I not hold it against anybody who aims to improve their life and hopefully succeed in doing so, but I made most happy at the thought, regardless of content or context.  I am also one of those people that believe that other people actually have real beliefs and that those beliefs are rarely cynical covers for status seeking and so on. And if there is a cynical component it is also invariably accompanied by sincerity. I believe in belief, as it were.

None of the foregoing means in any way that one should go on about such matters at all times and to all people. Now there are some great exceptions to this. There are some issues that are, objectively speaking, always, already a federal case.  But these are far fewer than we realize or the more civic minded among us would wish.  Examples are serious crimes or violence to individuals or populations, natural disasters, the effects of climate change, But as a favorite philosopher Bernard Williams pointed out, humans need a place or space for nonmoral values, things that fall outside the category of obligation. Part of the the problem in my case is how and when I was raised: I was taught not to advertise oneself and herald what one has accomplished. I guess it was seen as excessively immodest. For me the aesthetic downside of such flag waving and parading compromised whatever virtues the individual's story possessed for the reader or listener.

This past year has been marked by enormous change, change far greater than I am frankly as able to live with as I should like. For thirty plus years of my life I lived in one of the largest cities in the northeastern United States, and in the downtown city part. mind you, not any of the suburbs or exurbs. Now I find myself living in a culture, geography, even world, seemingly opposite in every way to that which I was not only accustomed but also innately loved. To say this has been a challenge would be an understatement. I believe it is also harder to do this at the age of fifty than, say, thirty or even forty. (For me, anyway). One of the bright moments is I have been most prolific. I am working on more than one instrumental large scale composition as well as work for small groups and solo piano. I also plan to go into the recording studio soon, and am looking into the possibilities of a podcast! Another bright location is I have found immense goodness, from both humans and nonhuman nature, where I now live.

Nic Roeg's use of typical 1970s wallpaper - often found in dental offices

Recently a favorite filmmaker, Nicholas Roeg, died and I was put in mind, when reflecting on my own experience of this world from the time I was first aware of being conscious, of his The Man Who Fell To Earth, in particular the opening sequence. Now I do not have the ability to do a shot by shot analysis of the whole thing but heaven knows it would be worth doing, so masterful a piece of filmmaking it is (like all of Roeg, in fact). While we are on the subject of Nicholas Roeg, here is an excerpt from a paper I wrote wayback in 1987 on his Don't Look Now, comparing the characters of the Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland characters:

Now I don't have the space to go into all of the intricacy that is Man Who Fell To Earth, but I want to concentrate on the opening sequence which in a sense depicts the falling to earth of a being from another society/planet/life - take your pick. (Indeed Roeg maintained that the movie was not science fiction proper but was a bout a person who was unusual and an extreme nonconformist, almost as if Roeg, like fellow genius, Andrei Tarkovsky, simply didn't buy the literalism of whole notion of genre and generic rules.  David Bowie suggested much the same thing in an interview: "…it's assumed he's an alien from outer space, but it may not necessarily be true".

There are no documents of the opening screen online in their original form but here is one with an added soundtrack from David Bowie (not the original instrumental 1970s styled music which I consider actually appropriate to the scene).https://youtu.be/gY4FOSaSoDo

Thematically The Man Who Fell to Earth is part of a very long line of artistic works that negotiate or think about the question of what it means to be an insider or outsider, Although Roeg was an English director this concern with the tension between the individual and the collective has also been important in American arts and letters from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Ralph Ellison's  Invisible Man.  The best world of art on this theme finally do not have all the answers. I mean narratively we know, see, and experience empathically the bowie figures descent into ruin and a kind of alcoholism, among other problems and it is made clear in no uncertain terms that the United States, or at least the United States of 1973 did this to him. That is less important than the feeling we get watching the film. In this film, like in all great films the feeling is what matters rather than the fact.


Now the thing to notice in this sequence is this man literally falls into earth - evidently into, at least initially, a more rural part of the United States. He appears to have trouble walking in the whole mass of soil and dirt and the slope of a mountain, but also seems guided in his walking by force not entirely his own. He is then is inundated with shocking and sudden stimuli of various kinds, not only unknown images what looks to be a poor family of some kind but a drunk man yelling things at Bowie and finally some kind of garish and loud amusement park figure in the shape of a smiley face. Overwhelmed, the Bowie figure collapses on a bench outside a small town antique store. We in the audience are placed in the same position as the protagonist through the visual telling of the sequence. This is a most important example of Roeg's cinematic style, a kind of associative cutting that is not about forward momentum or events inside linear time, but a (visually) poetic linking of one thing or group of things with another.

I mention this opening to suggest that in many (but not all) important ways, the world has appeared  to the present fifty-one year old author as it does in the opening of this picture from 1974. That is, I am faced with a lot of stimuli and do not immediately form a conceptual system to integrate it into a narrative whole. This has both advantages as much as disadvantages.  The feeling of being an outsider can be a function not of any complex emotional symbolism or ideas and ideals about how the world should work but a function of the shocking newness of the world's aesthetics which is on a level far before the complex emotions of ethical evaluation. Sometimes the world appears to you a plastic multicolored smiley face from an abandoned theme park and you have to find a way to move past it or get around it - if you aren't forced to laugh - all the while wondering where it came from and what it is doing there.

One of my favorite philosophers George Kateb has the concept of what he calls "positive alienation" where alienation is a source of independence of mind that is fruitful and possessed of wisdom rather than anything pejorative having to do with loneliness proper. Most recently I have become a partial sort of relativist, convinced that there is not an Archimedean point where we can evaluate an d master everything all at once, Now by relativist I am not referring to the inability to know or the inability to be wrong or right about proper conduct. I mean that much of human life comes down not to right and wrong which actually concern a small area of life, (though an area of life that has greatest emotional intensity for us as if it were all, rather than a small part, of life) but to things like fashion and preference rather than objectivity. And when I use the word fashion I mean something considerably sturdier and longer lasting than trend or fad, close to what the word culture used to mean. One of the problems in our current moment is that the bigness of our technological society and the need to integrate so many billions of people (or, rather, the belief that we ought to so integrate) is at odds with the differences among all those many people, differences that make integration not really attainable.

I close with another video,  this one an excerpt from an experimental film on Roeg that I happened across.

Birthday Meditations

“Even if we distance ourselves from some of our thoughts and impulses, and regard them from outside, the process of trying to place ourselves in the world leads eventually to thoughts that we cannot think of as merely “ours”. If we think at all, we must think of ourselves, individually and collectively, as submitting to the order of reasons rather than creating it.” Thomas Nagel, The Last Word

Each of us has an internal state that has gone by many different names and been addressed in radically disparate ways. Some will speak of the soul or spirit, others simply talk of consciousness, possibly the dimmest among us will speak merely of a self-organizing organism, or even only neural circuitry. This interiority is a sacred bedrock. It is inviolable.  It is not only that this state is supremely individual unique - being full of colors, shades, tones, subtleties, nuances, indirection - but it is an opaque one. No amount of quantification or measurement will ever capture the limits of this state, so full and deep is its mysteries, so vast is its contents and horizon, to paraphrase the great Heraclitus ("the obscure").

Yet as we face the world, in and with our interiority, we face what is, in part, a profoundly external world, a world at times so external as to be quite alien and apart, however unified we might feel or claim to be with this external reality. There is a real separation here. A great deal of this external world consist of plethora of stimuli - literally "coming at us", of course in the form of solid objects as well as more fluid colors and lights, but above all in separate life forms, from humble vegetation, to complex animals, and, above all, other fellow humans who are as akin to us as they are opposite to us.

I must say that my chief problem as a human being, for my first forty years on this marvelous planet, has been in the negotiation and relationship between the inner and outer worlds. It is not a question of boundaries but rather of feelings. Simply put, I rarely match the external world in terms of likes, dislikes, or what I feel to be important on the inside. Moreover, the sheer density of stimulation from this external world can at times be most overwhelming. One solution I came across was my discovery of the truth of pluralism. I realized, upon leaving my thirties, that others can achieve the deepest pleasures from things with which I have had only negative experiences and, of course, in reverse. That is, my own internal states, though important and sacred to me, are of little or no use in terms of other's values. I began to read the world around me in the terms that others created. I began to step outside of myself and try and see others as having equal, sometimes greater, yet very different claims. This is not quite the same as sympathy or empathy; it is a "meta" belief wherein my awareness of other's values allows me to put aside my own values and essentially ask others where their happiness comes from. I cannot live there, for that would be to lose myself, but I certainly must visit and visit regularly.

A large measure of human culture and art, and I should include practical philosophy as well as politics and economics, is concerned with how we are to negotiate the boundary of the inner and the outer, how we are to understand it, if and when we are to fight or love it, if we are to transform it, overturn it or defend the status quo and on what grounds and so on.

Sometime during the past decade I became familiar with the thought and scholarship of one George Kateb. He is really one of the few philosopher/academics who, as odd as it is to say in what is essentially an aporetic tradition, seems to give more correct answers to some important questions. He works in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau and thus could be called a kind of individualist, and yet - and this is most important - he rejects all appeals to conservatism and tradition. Kateb's individualism is of a most responsible kind. He is sui generis: he rejects communitarian and utilitarian infringements upon individual conscience and liberty, while at the same time he upholds the strongest sense of social responsibility. It is the rare thinker or intellectual who can do both and moreover offer a theory of both.



His most recent book is called Human Dignity and it is a beautiful work of prose, easily one of the best works of non-fiction in the past decade. I should like to use my forty-fifth birthday to do briefly review it. However, I am not sure review is quite the word since I really only have time, space, and, more importantly, energies to summarize in a brief note and offer examples from this work.

George Kateb's aim in the entire book is to defend and define what it is in us or about us that makes us human - in the spiritual and non-reductive sense of that label - and to describe, if only in part, what about our humanity makes us special on this planet. This last project will doubtless not always endear Kateb to anti-"speciesist" egalitarians, yet I feel that Kateb is onto something most important when I think of that fact that no other living creature composes a Beethoven's Ninth, enters couples' counseling, or negotiates at Camp David. One lengthy passage reveals the quality and character of Kateb's prose:

"A uniquely human trait, self-consciousness is potentially but not actually possessed by all human beings, whereas consciousness is actually possessed by all the living who function. To be a self-conscious person is to be conscious of oneself as a self, as a person who can think about many things, but also about himself or herself. A person can arrive at a self-conception. But the process is not automatic, and cultural conditions - say, tribal life or village life - may discourage it or be so rigorous in in suppression of the sense of self that many people would find it strange to imagine what it means to have a self-conception. They know themselves through a group, and the group knows itself through its differences from other groups. Without a self-conception, we are tends to take the place of I am, in most of the transactions of life. Some choices might be left free, and particular members of a group might stand out because they perform exceptional deeds. In larger hierarchical societies where human rights are not recognized, self-consciousness is actually consciousness of oneself as a member of this class or caste rather than that one. Such consciousness is quite compatible with individual egotism, but the ego is defined by reference to membership. One cannot imagine oneself separately from membership. But in a society in which people have a sense of individual human rights and the state recognizes and respects those rights, a particular self-consciousness will develop; the ego will grow in a certain direction. One feels special not because one has what others lack, or has a rank higher than others, but because one has has what everyone is entitled to have, just by being human." 

Readers should note that this is an argument reminiscent of Kateb in his Patriotism and Other Mistakes, in which he regards patriotism itself as immoral, in part for its violation of the individual in the name of group pride and identity. It is this part of Kateb that places him at odds with both the Left and Right on our current political spectrum. His belief in unearned human dignity makes him automatically opposed to all conservatism and libertarianism because if we have innate unearned human dignity then we are entitled to certain things without having to appeal for them at best or beg for them at worst as in, say, health care or food (to say nothing of nutrition). His remarks about group identity might put him at odds with a Left that wants to speak on behalf of suppressed or repressed group identities as groups rather than as lone individuals. But Kateb is ultimately making an ontological argument as is clear from this passage:

"Human life at any time and all through time is ultimately incomprehensible. this incomprehensibility is testimony to human stature, perverse as that may sound. Human stature is not so great as to have the capacity to take the measure of human stature. Humanity is too much to be encompassed; it is indefinitely large in its actuality, past and present, and unpredictable in the future. In contrast objective knowledge of nature, which has no inwardness is easier on the talented mind despite formidable obstacles, than understanding human life which is governed by human inwardness."

Starting from the tradition of Emerson, with its respect for infinite mystery and finite intellect  it comes as no surprise that Kateb is skeptical and at times hostile to attempts to make scientific explanations of who we are as the only acceptable explanations. Kateb is not hostile to science as such, but rather to all forms of tyranny: an attitude of regarding us as mere matter or, however more noble, as just a natural object or life form among others on this planet - in a word, anti-humanism - is an attitude that has similar problems in intellectual life as tyranny does in social and political life. Kateb is a critic of evolutionary biological accounts of the human being that aim to replace other accounts. Like Thomas Nagel, he manages to maintain a strictly secular even agnostic foundation while still insisting upon a spiritualistic definition of our humanity. He agrees with the scientific conclusions of evolution but also agrees with the worries of those religionists who feel that those conclusions are insufficient and are partly bereft:

"Against evolutionary psychology in particular, we can say that it is a category mistake, indeed a serious blunder, to say that on any given occasion, a person't motive, mediated as it is by mind, is unconsciously determined by evolutionary inheritance. No human motive is reducible to a natural cause. Human self-description is not a superstructure of superstition."

"Against neuroscience I want to say that when a section of the brain lights up on a scanning device, as, say, the person is listening to music, we learn nothing interesting about the person's experience of the music or the music itself."

Kateb might be seen as going too far here in the eyes of many, especially with the popularity of bestselling non-fiction books concerning our brains on music, yet I would still maintain that Kateb's old fashioned argument might be more properly thought of as an argument on behalf of the humanities itself as an equal though separate companion to the sciences. And Kateb has much to say in the latter chapters of the book on what art is and how best to evaluate it.

Throughout the book Kateb wrestles with the tension between fairness and justice on the one hand and excellence and reward for unique effort on the other. Kateb also makes the rather unfashionable claim in this age of Nature awareness, that we are not wholly natural beings, but in part artificial, subject to cultural innovation and diversity. George Kateb is unafraid to take commonsensical intuitions (say, our sense of being somehow free in making choices, as not merely beholden to nature or tradition alone, our sense that we can trust at least some of our senses) seriously as having objective truth. He is not hypnotized into a skepticism about our perceptions by the apparent success of scientific assaults upon those perceptions. In this sense George Kateb is, as he admits on other occasions, trying to take a democratic approach to life in the wider sense of the word democratic than the political sense. Though he is labelled a political philosopher, Kateb wants to restore the value of that which resides outside of our roles as citizens, the value of that which is separate from roles as such.

I cannot recommend Human Dignity highly enough. Though it is ostensibly a work of non-fiction philosophy it reads as beautifully as poetry or prose. Its subject is nothing less that the state and status of our humanity itself.

Human Dignity by George Kateb The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2011